Call Center Outsourcing Featured Article

How the Hosted Model Simplifies Contact Center and CRM Solutions

TMCnet News

On-demand – or hosted - solutions offer a serious alternative to the complexities and risks associated with traditional on-premise solutions. On-demand solutions can simplify the management of complex business processes, deliver advanced contact center and CRM functionality that may not otherwise be feasible for departments or small- and mid-size businesses, and ease the internal responsibilities of supporting and maintaining the systems.

 

When evaluating on-demand versus on-premise, there are four critical considerations that can greatly simplify the complexities of implementation and maintenance:

 

1. Data Ownership and Security

Security is one of the primary concerns that companies encounter when evaluating an on-demand solution, but the reality is that a good hosting center will have highly advanced security measures in place that far surpass the security found in all but the most sensitive enterprises. To achieve expected client results, a hosting center maintains a robust network environment with extensive data redundancy, application monitoring and pre- and post-production quality assurance procedures. Moreover, a multi-tiered operations team should be in place to employ industry best practices for disaster recovery and operations support.

 

2. Leveraging Existing IT Investments for Seamless Integration

A core architectural philosophy of an on-demand solution is to facilitate a deep legacy/enterprise integration capability that allows organizations to leverage existing application and system investments. The focus of the integration framework is to enable an organization to span multiple systems to see a single view of a customer across the enterprise with all of the information that is necessary to effectively handle, manage and report against any interaction, transaction or transaction exception. A web-based framework leverages data that resides in existing front-end and backend systems versus replacement or integration. This framework and system collaboration process eliminates the integration challenges of data replication and associated data currency and accuracy issues.

 

3. Customizing to Meet Unique Requirements 

An on-demand internet application framework functions as an interaction-management overlay for legacy applications and business-process integration. Telephony, hardware and software are pre-integrated. The hosting center simply applies template-driven configuration components such as CTI, knowledge management, queuing and routing/workflows, e-mail, chat, analog and digital phone and fax communication tools. This multi-tenant architecture eliminates the time-consuming and repetitive processes involved in implementing new contact centers, departments or divisions.

 

4. Streamlining Implementation and Maintenance

A true, Net-Native J2EE™ solution eliminates the need for client/server applications on user desktops, saving in initial installation and ongoing maintenance costs. Plus, it utilizes the internet as a global delivery system for maximum up-time and flexibility while ensuring full security. Moreover, some on-demand solutions can provide an environment that can be customized and extended with additional fields and tabs from the configuration console, without development work. Not only does this result in quick implementations, it also eliminates additional work when upgrading or moving customizations or data schemas during version upgrades, migrations or standard certification to production processes.